Britain's hopes of a Winter Olympics fit to follow last year's golden summer are going downhill fast. Which happens to be exactly the Games plan for Sochi next February.

High speed and hi-tech form the blueprint which it is hoped could see Team GB enjoy some replica of the success that captivated the nation during London 2012. No winter sports squad has been better prepared or funded than that assembled for a recent dry run at Bath University for the coming assault in the Caucasus Mountains which form the breathtaking backdrop to Russia's chic Black Sea resort.

Even if winter sports fail to grab you by the snowballs at this time of the year, the British Olympic Association's (BOA) summer camp for more than 50 assorted skiers, sledders, skaters and curlers was indicative of the aim to achieve Britain's most successful Winter Games since 1924, which saw four medals - gold in curling, silver in bobsleigh and bronze in figure skating and ice hockey.

There is certainly a resolute belief that Britain can return with more than the solitary medal - gold from Amy Williams in the skeleton - won in Vancouver four years ago.

The optimistic mood was captured even in mid-August, six months away from Sochi, with a display of team bonding which included a manufactured snowball fight on Bath's lush green pastures.

So, with apologies to Shakespeare and Richard III, will Sochi be Britain's winter of content, made glorious summer by this sun of Bath?

Shelley Rudman is a strong medal hope for Britain at Sochi 2014

The thought of which is reflected in the podium aspirations of Britain's potentially best prospect for gold in them thar Sochi hills...Shelley Rudman, the 32-year-old Wiltshire-born mum who risks life and limb every time she hisses head first down the ice tunnel flat on her face at 90mph on a brakeless bob skeleton, the oddball event in which she is the current world champion.

That skeleton, which actually does reside in a cupboard at her home, now in Sheffield, is certainly something of a bone-shaker - 40kg of hi-tech machinery which, when put on ice, goes like a bomb, exploding into 60 seconds of sheer terror.

There are 18 curves on a skeleton run, all of them dangerous. "At first there's just this incredible silence inside your helmet," the delightful Rudman told insidethegames during a break from her training on Bath's push-start track. "Then all you can hear is the clattering as you're going down.

"When you do a corner, well it's a great feeling, a tremendous thrill - whoosh! Then you seem to float your way down. A fraction of a second can be the difference between first and last." Not to mention injury-or worse.

Rudman is certainly no stranger to danger, like being been flung off and bounced along the inner walls of the ice.

She can still painfully recall one particularly dramatic crash at Salt Lake City. "I went hard into bend six. The pressure slammed my head down and I just nutted the ice. I couldn't remember anything. Suddenly I saw I was flying towards bend twelve, and thought, 'Wow, what happened to the last four bends?'

"I could just see the darkness rising. I knew it was blood filling my helmet. That's when you start panicking. You think, 'How much damage have I done?' I could feel the blood leaking out of my helmet and my nose was broken. I had to have an operation because the septum had divided."

Nodar Kumaritashvili suffered a fatal crash during a training run for Vancouver 2010

A day before the last Games opened in Vancouver a young Georgian luger, Nodar Kumaritashvili, suffered fatal injuries during a training run on the track also used for bobsleigh and skeleton, the fourth athlete to have died during Winter Olympics preparations.

Conscious of this the Russian organisers have introduced a novel feature for Sochi, small hillocks designed rather like sleeping policemen to slow the sledders down. "It's strange having to negotiate uphill as well as down," says Rudman. "But look, this is a risk sport - we all know that. The inherent danger is part of the thrill."

Skeleton has been Great Britain's most successful Winter Olympic sport in recent Games, never failing to produce medal since its inception in 2002.

Rudman herself won a silver in Turin in 2006 but four years later it was her teammate, the now-retired Williams who became the golden girl. Their relationship was ice cool, and the sixth-placed Rudman admits: "It was a bit of a downer. I needed some time to get over it."

But this winter's World Championship victory coupled with the overall World Cup title last season, has sent those Sochi hopes soaring. "Now I have to get things right for the big one. It has been back to the drawing board."

That board is something she pores over with her partner Kristan Bromley, 41, aka Dr Ice, who won the men's world title in 2008 and is a renowned bob skeleton boffin, a former graduate trainee with British Aerospace, now a professor of physics who has applied years of research in refining an object that once resembled a tea tray into such a sophisticated piece of aero-dynamics. Yet he says when he was first asked in the nineties what he knew about bob skeleton he thought they were referring to a bloke.

But what is it about the sport that so attracts women, who in this country, seem better equipped to master it than men? "I doubt it is anything physiological," says Rudman, like Williams a former hurdler, who took it up while a student at Bath. "Maybe there's that something extra inside us which tells us we have to prove to ourselves that we can be as good, if not better than men at certain sports, and this is one of them."

Rudman and fiancé Bromley have a five-and a half-year-old daughter, Ella, but say marriage is on the back burner until after the Games.

"Having Ella really helps me," says Rudman. "Sometimes she comes with us to competitions. I can be on the start line and she'll shout, just as it falls quiet, 'Go, go, mummy!' Or I can be in the crouch position and she'll yell, 'I love you mummy!' Those are special moments but, as soon as I'm ready, I don't hear anything. I'm on my own.

"Winning the World Championship is a real motivation for the Olympics, but the expectations now are enormous."

Which is why Britain's coolest runner says she needs to be utterly focused. "Everybody is expecting me to bring back gold."

Expectations are also high for Elise Christie as Britain's first World Cup champion at 1,000 metres


Expectations are high elsewhere too. Short-track speed skater Elise Christie is Britain's first World Cup champion at 1,000 metres and says: "I do think this is going to be the most successful Winter Olympics ever for Britain."

And Scotland's curlers led by bagpipe-playing Eve Muirhead - who comprise Team GB - are current world champions reckoned to have a great chance of emulating Rhona Martin's squad of 2002.

While Britain's bobbers had a poor Games in Vancouver results have improved and last year Mica McNeill and Jazmin Sawyers claimed a historic Youth Olympics silver in Innsbruck.

Paula Walker and Gillian Cooke have been consistently in the World Cup top 10 and the men's four-man had a fifth-placed finish at this year's World Championships in Switzerland.

James Woods could win Britain's first Olympic medal on snow


It is also hoped that the addition of the former Olympic sprinter Craig Pickering can boost the prospects of the two-man squad. "Modern bobsleigh requires a fast, explosive start and a recruitment drive to bring in top-class athletes has meant we are now amongst the fastest starters in the world," says performance director Gary Anderson.

Britain has never won an Olympic medal on snow - Alain Baxter's slalom bronze in 2002 was rescinded for failing a drugs test - but that could be rectified in Sochi following the debut of snowboarding slopestyle, where in New Zealand 21-year-old James Woods has become the second British winter athlete to reach a World Cup podium this season, after a similar silver for Jenny Jones.

A phrase frequently heard immediately after London 2012 was: "Follow that!"

This is exactly what leading lady Rudman and GB's Winter Games ensemble are keen to do in sport's next big production number. The rehearsals are going well, but Sochi's slopes are particularly slippery, so fingers crossed.

As they say, there's no business like snow business.

Alan Hubbard is a sports columnist for The Independent on Sunday, and a former sports editor of The Observer. He has covered a total of 16 Summer and Winter Games, 10 Commonwealth Games, several football World Cups and world title fights from Atlanta to Zaire.